It just happened to me these days that I was entangled in a weird mess of communication and misunderstanding. Everything around me started boiling, it was amazing how a molehill became a mountain. It is interesting that exactly today I discovered this talk of Temple Grandin on TED, and it helped me to regain some peace in my mind, because I had started doubting myself in a way that was not constructive anymore.

As I see it, one of the major handicaps in communication is that we are jumping to conclusions, that we are concerned about the similarities among us by neglecting, ignoring or even discriminating the differences. We prefer the alliances and condemn the other. I think this is so very wrong and it is so very prejudicial to our interactions with all kind of living beings. Temple Grandin gives a thrilling insight into her autistic mind. We don’t have madness, and we don’t have psychiatric cases in the world, we have a continuum of differently wired minds with different ways of thinking and behavior respectively emerging from these different structures. There are all transitions between visual to pattern to verbal thinking/working minds. Difference thus is not a domain of philosophy and social science only but “hard-wired” natural science.

Since I am working with biestmilch I feel it under my skin everyday what it means to walk on another path because of a mind that ticks the way it does, a mind that forces me to work the way I work … and I am told every other day how I could do better, but I can’t … and I learned to smile regardless

I loved to listen to Marc Pachter with his authentic way of being. His words are wise (he got this age where one can dare to talk about wisdom). His liveliness and his openness are amazing. I myself am forced into interview situations once and again. As an absolute beginner I really could learn from Pachter what it takes to get a quality interview that is of interest and thrill for others. As a good interviewer you have to be gutsy even for the sake of compromising yourself and you have to have the empathy to pierce the shell of your interview partner, and the interviewee on the other side has to have this urge to tell his/her story and should not be modest.

Marc Pachter is a cutural historian, and has spent his career curating and creating intimate portraits of the lives of others.

After my intensive weeks with triathlon I feel it is high time to shift gears and focus on other topics too. My readers who are not involved with this sport may be bored by then, and complain about the monotony. Since weeks I have not been checking my newsreader, today I did… being so tired that I just let myself drift through the headlines, my eyes came to an halt at the name of Oliver Sacks. I listened to his talk and it really hit me. It gives wonderful evidence that seeing is not only a phenomenon induced by the world that surrounds us, but also by the very inside of our body and brain.

If your eyes go blind, then you may realize that seeing is a complex process that also produces images without external stimuli. And I think we should be aware of the fact that seeing (hallucinating) is not necessarily connected with insanity. Many a blind person probably sees images and doesn’t dare to speak about them because they are afraid of being discriminated as insane.

Oliver Sacks is well known as a writer of such best-selling case histories as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars, and his memoir of his early work, Awakenings, all of which have breathed new life into the dusty 19th-century tradition of the clinical anecdote. He maintains a small practice in New York City.

Since months I am working on a profile for a new biestmilch team member, so it happened that I actually have one in my drawer, but I don’t know where to post it, after all the frustrations I experienced from conventional ads on conventional job platforms. Now, this morning I came across this TED talk by Dan Pink. And I thought that’s it, this is exactly the type of person I am looking for, people who are geared by intrinsic motivation. I won’t post the job profile in this place because it is of no importance here. Listen to this talk, and see whether you can connect to it, whether you can align with the spirit behind; if yes, you may be interested to contact us and learn more details about the job, the team and our goals. Contact me: susann@biestmilch.com

With a trio of influential bestsellers, Dan Pink has changed the way companies view the modern workplace. In the pivotal A Whole New Mind, Pink identifies a sea change in the global workforce — the shift of an information-based corporate culture to a conceptual base, where creativity and big-picture design dominates the landscape.